When an on-line buyer attempts to purchase something from an on-line merchant's service over the World-Wide Web (WWW) a variety of security mechanisms are used to protect both the on-line buyer and the on-line merchant from fraud. For example, the buyer and the merchant may interact with one another using secure communications, such as Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) referred to as HTTPS. Yet, even when secure communications are implemented fraud can still occur.
For instance, buyers may attempt to feign their electronic identities during on-line transactions with the merchant. One way this may occur is for a buyer to use a delivery address for a product that is different from a billing address that the merchant maintains for a buyer's account. In fact in some cases, the merchant may not maintain addresses at all for its buyers; thus, a malicious buyer may charge with a different person's credit card and have the goods delivered to location being monitored by the malicious buyer.
To combat the problems associated with postal addresses, many merchants will use an Address Verification Service (AVS) for credit card purchases. An AVS compares a given postal address of an on-line buyer against a billing address for the buyer. The billing address is typically listed on a credit card account which is being used by the buyer for a given transaction. However, sometimes a buyer may actually have multiple addresses that are legitimate, such as when a buyer has a business address and a home address, when a buyer maintains two homes, and the like. Furthermore, an AVS generally requires an exact match against a supplied address and recorded billing address. Thus, even small mistakes or alternative spellings may result in erroneous rejections, which may be annoying to buyers or may result in non-consummated purchases for a merchant.
Additionally, buyers may not always use credit cards to make on-line purchases; that is, buyers may prefer to make on-line purchases via loans, funded accounts, electronic fund transfers, and the like. When alternative purchasing arrangements are used, the on-line merchant may not be capable of processing the transaction through an AVS and/or may have to rely on its own security initiatives to protect against fraud, but at the same time the merchant still wants to provide its buyers (customers) with the purchasing flexibility that they demand. This flexibility includes allowing buyers to use multiple addresses for purposes of acquiring goods and permitting the buyers to use multiple purchasing options for purposes of funding purchases.